Emma and Mary Tudor. In terms of embroidery style, the history medallions will be a mix of large stitches and petit-point using finer wool and silk, and which require more skill. Only the more experienced broderers will work on them. The rest of us will fill in the backgrounds and borders. Miss Pesel has done the top of one of the history cushions to show us what we’ll be aiming to make. Would you like to see it?”
Violet nodded.
“Biggins will have stored it in the cupboard in the hall, I expect. You go back to your sorting and I’ll fetch it.” She pulled out two hanks of blue from the bundle. “Here’s your third and fourth blues.”
Violet stared. “They look the same to me.”
Gilda laughed. “Once you’ve worked with them for months you become intimate with each shade.” She winked as she hurried away.
Violet studied the wool, straining to distinguish between the different tones of blue. She closed her eyes for a moment, and thought about a drawing class she had taken several years before in Southampton. She had gone with a friend, who married the next year and disappeared into that life, keen not to be reminded by Violet of her previous surplus status. As they scraped their pencils over rough drawing paper, their teacher – a genial man who’d lost an arm in the War (“Not the drawing arm, mind – thank God for His small mercies”) – told them to be like soldiers and close the mind while opening the eyes.
It had made Violet wonder if Laurence had done that – followed orders and stopped thinking on the battlefield. There was no information about how he died, no account from his commanding officer or fellow soldiers, no small details (“He made the men smile with his imitations of the Kaiser”) or strong adjectives or adverbs (“Lieutenant Furniss fought bravely alongside his comrades and played a major role in defending the territory gained”). Perhaps the officer had written too many of those letters that day and had run dry of uplifting phrases and superlatives. Or maybe no one had seen what happened to Laurence Furniss: he was one of hundreds of British soldiers who died at Passchendaele on the 1st of August 1917. Presumably he had done nothing out of the ordinary; dying that day wasn’t special. Although no one said, Violet heard afterwards about the terrible mud there, and wondered if he had simply got stuck in it and become an easy target.
One evening at the drawing class the regular teacher was absent and a woman took his place for the evening. Her style was very different: while she set up the usual still-lifes of fruit and bottles and glasses, she had them draw quickly, then move around the room to another easel and draw quickly again, and again, then go back to their original easel and spend an hour on the drawing. Violet was not sure what she was meant to learn – that things looked different from different angles, she supposed. It made her want to go outside and smoke.
The new teacher prowled behind them, stopping to peer at their drawings and make comments – few of them complimentary. Violet tried to block the sound of her voice, retreating deep inside her thoughts. She heard her name being called from a distance, but only when a hand was waved in front of her barely-begun drawing did she listen.
“Miss Speedwell, what are you thinking of?”
“My brother,” she replied, surprised into honesty. George had had some words attached: “noble effort”, “stalwart in the face of enemy fire”, “died bravely defending the most sacred values of this country”. She could repeat these phrases because her mother had done so often over the years, sucking every drop of comfort from them until they were dry and meaningless as sticks.
“Stop thinking about him,” the teacher commanded. “He is not here.” She gestured at the still-life. “You should be thinking of nothing more than where the highlight is on the apple, or how to achieve the glassiness of the bottle. Your entire focus should be on what you are looking at – let the rest drain away. It will make for a better drawing – and it will be a relief to you too, to remain in the moment, not to dwell.” With these last words she gave Violet permission to set George and Laurence aside for the evening. She made her best drawing that night, and never felt the need to go back again.
Now, with the blue wools to sort, she tried to bring back that feeling of extraneous thoughts draining away to leave her vision clear. It was remarkable how much was knocking about inside her brain: curiosity about what Gilda was going to show her; anxiety that she would not be able to wield a needle well enough to embroider anything for the Cathedral; rage at Mrs Biggins for taking such satisfaction in belittling the workers; shyness at trying to find a place amongst all of these women who already knew what they were doing; concern that no one would even notice she was missing from work that morning; calculation about what she could have for supper that didn’t involve sardines, beans, or sprats, as she was so sick of them. There were probably more thoughts in there, but Violet cleared out most of her mind, looked at the wool again, and immediately recognised that one of the blues had a tinge of green in it, making it sea-like and murky, like her eyes, which she had always wished were a cleaner blue – like the light blue hank she picked out and dropped into its box. Light blue, mid-royal with a hint of grey, green-blue, and dark blue. Within a couple of minutes she’d sorted them, so that when Gilda came back, she had finished.
“Here we are,” Gilda said, setting down a rectangular piece of canvas embroidery about thirteen by thirty inches. In the central medallion were small, careful petit-point stitches done in subtle shades of brown and cream, depicting a tree, with two blue and tan peacocks standing in its branches, pecking at bunches of dangling grapes while a goat and a deer grazed below. The peacock feathers were intricately rendered, and the grapes expertly shaded with just a few dots of colour. Surrounding the medallion was bolder, cruder embroidery in a complicated pattern of bold stitches that created blue Celtic knots and red flowers on a background of yellow.
“This is exquisite,” Violet declared, tracing the peacock with a finger. “So beautifully done I can’t imagine anyone will actually sit on it when it’s in use.”
There was a laugh – not Gilda’s high tinkle, but lower and mellifluous. Violet looked up and found herself staring into two deep brown pools. Louisa Pesel’s gaze was direct and focused, despite the clamour in the room and Mrs Biggins hovering at her elbow. She looked at Violet as if she were the only person here who mattered.
“What part of Winchester history is this?” Violet asked. “I’ve not lived here long, and this is unfamiliar.”
“You must look further afield, to the Bible.”
“The Tree of Life?” Violet guessed. Like everyone else here, already she wanted to please Miss Pesel.
The older woman beamed. “Yes. The other historic medallions will be directly connected to Winchester, but I thought the first might be more universal. Luckily Dean Selwyn agreed with me, though I only told him after the medallion was half-done.” She chuckled. “This one and another will be for the vergers’ seats on either side of the central aisle when you enter the choir. They are just that bit longer than the rest, because the seats are wider. Perhaps vergers are wider than the rest of us!”
“Miss Pesel, this is Miss Speedwell, our newest recruit,” Mrs Biggins interjected. “Though it is rather late in the day for her to start.”
“It is never too late,” Miss Pesel rejoined. “We have hundreds of cushions and kneelers to make. We shall be stitching for years, and need to put every possible hand to the pump. I see Mrs Biggins has got you sorting wool. That’s all well and good, but if you are to start embroidering over the summer break, you must learn your stitches now. I shall teach you myself. Come and sit.” She led the way to two spaces that had miraculously opened up at the table without her having to ask. “Miss Hill, would you kindly fetch a square of canvas and a model for Miss Speedwell? No need for a frame just yet.”
Gilda grinned at Violet as she hurried away, her eyes disappearing into slits, her teeth bright and horsey.
“Now, Miss Speedwell, have you ever done any embroidery?” Miss Pesel tilted her head like a bird. “No cross-stitch at school?”
“I don’t—” Violet stopped. She could feel a dim memory emerging,